While experimenting with s3fs I have also found out another tool written in go programming language that named Goofys. Like s3fs, this tool can also mount Amazon S3 bucket as a folder that can later be accessed just like any other local folder making accessing files in S3 bucket, backing up data or syncing files quite easy. Detailed installation manual for Goofys covers only Mac while Linux installation guide is basically non-existing, so this will be my guide on how to install Goofys and mount Amazon S3 bucket on an Ubuntu Linux. This has been tested on DigitalOcean droplet running a Ubuntu version 16.04.3 x64. If you’re also testing this out on a new VPS like me – make sure to execute apt-get update before you start.

But why would anyone want to use Goofys if s3fs is working fine? Well, according to benchmarks available at Goofys github main reason you would like to use this is performance! Goofys is much faster than s3fs. For some operations Goofys is ten times faster than s3fs making it the right choice for situations when you need access to S3 to be really fast (or as close as it being just a folder on the same drive).

How to install Go language on Ubuntu Linux?

As mentioned above Goofy is written in GO so we need to install GO in order to use Goofy. Installing go requires you to download the latest version from https://golang.org/dl/ unpack it:

And the final result is that now we have an s3 bucket mounted to our /backup folder with basically unlimited disk space (1PB) that we can use to store data or backups.

Unmounting the S3 bucket is simple. Just execute:

<code>umount /backup</code>

Checking if it actually works

Everything seems fine – but does it work. To test that out I’ll create a file in /backup folder and since this is a new DigitalOcean droplet and I have no bigger files that I can copy, I’ll download a Go language installation file directly into /backup folder.

If everything works these should automatically be available inside Amazon’s console.